ERIC SCHENA INTERVIEW, PART TWO

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 29, July 21, 2024, Article 19

Greg Bennick also interviewed exonumia researcher and collector Eric Schena. Here's the second part, where Eric talks about tokens and their important connection to local history. -Editor

GREG BENNICK: That's incredible. I mean truly incredible. There was a few years ago maybe ten years ago I used to go out on the road and do these. I still speak professionally, but I would go out on the road and do these spoken word tours. And there was one night where I had off. I was on a tour in the, in the West, in the West, in Utah. The guy who was booking me was like, "Well you've got this night off" and I said, "Well I want to do something unusual. "So, I actually made an announcement that I was going to be speaking in an abandoned gold mining town, and that anyone interested from Salt Lake City who was interested in hearing me speak in an abandoned gold mining town could come drive three hours into the basically into the wild and come to this abandoned gold mining town.

And we set up in this abandoned literally abandoned, used to be a town, here area where there was just some mining equipment and some smelting equipment remaining. We set up a campfire, and there was about six or seven people who showed up, and it was half camping, half me doing my spoken presentation about legacy and whatnot and the things I was speaking on that that applied to that particular night. We put up a sign that announced that any of the ghosts of this old mining town who wanted to come to see this event, that they could come for free, and it was pretty remarkable. I did this presentation in the middle of this town.

And the reason I bring it up is because it speaks exactly to what you were talking about, that nothing was there of that town. And if you saw it, it was just residue of, you know, "industry" and people living there. But realistically, without bringing something to it, without your research, without the token that you identify as being from that town. The town would be gone without the spoken word show, the token, the research, the piece of scrip, whatever it is that you might have. So, it's pretty fascinating the way that we can keep history alive in a way quite literally through our hobby or through our actions or through our research, our interest.

ERIC SCHENA: Yep, I absolutely agree. If I may ask, what was the town that you were speaking?

GREG BENNICK: I knew you were going to ask me and the second, I'm going to look it up while we're talking. Okay, I got it. It was Frisco, Utah, and I know nothing about it.

ERIC SCHENA: I have heard of it because it is known as one of the most dangerous wild towns in the West.

GREG BENNICK: I just got goosebumps for the first time in any Newman Numismatic Portal interview. That's amazing. Let me know if you ever encounter another token from Frisco but please tell us about…do you remember anything about the token from Frisco that you might have.

ERIC SCHENA: No, I don't. There's not an awful lot of information on this particular merchant. It does have a little bit of disputed attribution. Let's see if I can lay my hands on it.

GREG BENNICK: And while you do, I'll explain to people that you're absolutely right. That that's all I know about Frisco, Utah, is that it was this lawless place filled with gambling and murder and all sorts of things. And all that's left now as you drive up to it is some smelters, a whole bunch of mining equipment. I could probably put some photos in the video part of this interview of it. There's mining equipment, there's piles of rubble and the legacy of my spoken word show, which was the first live event in Frisco, Utah, in over a hundred years.

ERIC SCHENA: If memory serves me correctly, Frisco had a silver mine called the Horn Silver Mine. It was a huge mine. It was an underground working. I think this is the right town that I'm remembering. It collapsed and there were a massive number of deaths at that mine. I would have to do some research on that a little bit more, but the town did bounce back a little bit. But yeah, it's one of those Western ghost towns. I like Western ghost towns too. I have a very small collection of store tokens from the West. I briefly lived in Southern California, at Edwards Air Force Base and around there, there were two types of mines, gold mines and borax mines. The world's largest borax open pit was just north of the base and a place called appropriately named Boron and I remember as a kid, first off getting into rock hounding while I was out there and two, going to that open pit mine at the time it was called the U.S. Borax Mine. It's now owned by Rio Tinto, if I remember correctly, and it's just this enormous - you've never seen a hole that big - enormous hole in the ground, trying to dig all these minerals out.

And we, we learned a little bit about California's wild west history while we were living there, but I never really got into it until later when I started collecting tokens. Getting that piece of history, having a physical piece of history and being able to place it in a specific town… Like for instance, having a saloon token from Frisco or from any of those other places or Rhyolite, Nevada, or, I wish, Bodie, California, Bodie is one of the most famous of the of the ghost towns. And there are tokens known from Bodie and they fetch appropriate prices. They're not cheap. I don't have one. I wish I did! I've always liked that kind of thing.

So, I've kind of adopted that here since moving to Virginia in 1984. I still collect things…I mean…this is from Utah. This is panic scrip from a gold mine and abandoned town in gold in Kimberly. Now the scrip is usually listed under Richfield, Utah, but that was because that was the nearest banking town, the actual town where this was used was a hundred miles away in a place called Kimberly, way up high in the mountains, and there's nothing there now. Things like this, that's the history. And I consider myself a steward of that history. That is especially important with Western gold mines and non-gold, non-precious metal mines - what they would call hard rock mines versus coal mines, which is the primary mining around here. Two hours due west of where I live are the Upper Potomac coal fields. And there are an awful lot of scrip from those mines. Western Maryland has quite a few and bleeds a little into Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania has a different type of coal. Pennsylvania is primarily anthracite. West Virginia is mostly bituminous.

GREG BENNICK: Tell us the difference because I've got family from Pennsylvania and I feel ignorant and a little silly in the moment that I can't remember the difference. But please, for the viewers…

ERIC SCHENA: There is a difference. One has a higher sulfur content than the other. I believe anthracite burns cleaner, but bituminous is more common now lignite, which is also found in certain places in Western Virginia, that burns very dirty. And in fact, there was a there was a town called Lignite in a place called Botetourt County, Virginia. It is a ghost town is what an archeologist would call an ankle bone site. That means the the remains don't go any higher than your ankle. So that's a term that I learned in college when - my degree is in Greek and Roman archeology of all things.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah. That there's no structure higher than your ankle bone. So, we'll sometimes call them ankle bone sites. Lignite is entirely in the Jefferson National Forest now. And there are tokens from there and I do in fact have one but that's all our remains of that town.

GREG BENNICK: And I love what you said about being steward, a steward of the history. Right. And I mean, and not to bring it back to this Frisco, Utah experience, but we felt like we felt that night, like we were doing something and I'm putting this in air quotes "important", meaning that what we were doing wasn't important to anybody else, but historically we were remembering something and thus making it real again. And you're doing the same thing when you hold up a piece of currency from a town, a hundred miles from a bank that doesn't exist anymore. You're the one talking about that place today and keeping it alive and keeping it real.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah, exactly! And that's how I feel about it. And that's one of the reasons why, with the second edition of Dave's token book, I wanted to include pictures of some of these towns and some of these stores and some of the ephemera that goes with it. If you ever get a copy of the book, there are pieces of bill head and some checks, things like that, which tell that story. It gives a little bit more of a face to these objects. I mean, they're inanimate objects, but there's a story behind them and I want to tell that story. In the town that I used to live in, here in Virginia, there was a general store, maybe about two and a half miles away from my house. It was the general store. It was the grist mill. And it was also the post office for the town. The place was called Whitacre. It's still there.

The store building is still there though, it is abandoned unfortunately. I don't think the mill building is still there, but there were some cardboard tokens that were issued there. The great thing about them is they had to be signed. W.C. Whitacre was the first person who owned that store and then he passed it off to his sons. And one of them was named Landon and you'll see Landon Whitacre written on some of these tokens. And the funny thing about those is they all came from a batch that Dave himself got when he and his wife Joanne were going around the state of Virginia, collecting tokens and preparing for the book. He actually went to Whitacre and was inquiring about that general store.

It was still open at the time and I happen to know that it was owned by a man by the name of Dolan. But that family lived right across the street from the store and they invited him over. They had some sweet tea and he was asking about the tokens and they brought out a little jar of them and he picked out a bunch. And so that's where a big chunk of them came from. And that's the kind of story that I love to hear, because those people are no longer there. I don't know who owns that store building anymore and who knows what's going to happen to it in the future. It could end up like that store in Rileyville: bulldozed for a parking lot. So that's why it's important to preserve that history.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ERIC SCHENA INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n28a18.html)